“(It’s) The Fifth Sacred Thing — happening now in Brittany!”

A message viewed from above

Starhawk sent a note to the rest of the production crew, excited to share this story from one of her Earth Activist Training grads from England. In Brittany, there is a stranger-than-fiction, real life stand being taken by activists who for three years have occupied a wild and abundant 4000-acre landscape. Their purpose? To oppose the creation of a new (so-called “green”) airport for Nantes.

Here we share a few excerpts from this familiar-sounding tale:

“We have entered La ZAD (Zone A Défendre) – Europe’s largest postcapitalist protest camp – a kind of rural occupy on the eastern edge of Brittany, half and hour’s drive from the city of Nantes… (here) you can find illegal goat herds and organic bakeries, bike workshops and bee hives, working farms and communal kitchens, a micro brewery, a mobile library, and even a pirate radio station: Radio Klaxon.

The state assumed that by destroying the Zadists houses and gardens they would demoralise the movement. They thought it would collapse when its material base had been removed. But quite the opposite has happened. ‘Our home is not the cob walls and hay (bales), the bricks and mortar,’ says Sara, whose house was (razed) to the ground last week, ‘but the land and the neighbours and its those connections that have been strengthened during the evictions.’”

 

Click to read the full article by John Jordan.